“New to the Game” Tables Introduced at Full Tilt Poker

Wednesday, April 17th, 2013 by Ryan

Full Tilt Poker has now been in the poker news here twice this week, with the first time being the sentencing behind their original CEO in Ray Bitar. That news comes as not much of a surprise and something that really doesn’t affect the currently players on the revamped site. As you probably know by now, Full Tilt Poker was purchased by their biggest rival in PokerStars, who then set up a deal to pay back players the money that Full Tilt still owed. This amount was obvious massive, and was reported to be a ridiculous amount, and was even estimated around $350 million worldwide. Most of the international players have gotten paid back to this point it seems, but the United States and t heir players are still working their way through with the Department of Justice to get the money returned back to them, but that is a good chunk of change as well that is still owed from the new Full Tilt.

One of the first things that PokerStars did when they purchased Full Tilt Poker was made sure that the software played fairly similar, but did some upgrades to the site as a whole, and the games and tournaments that are offered. PokerStars has always been big on having a good range of games that they offer to players, and it seems that they have released a new type of game that players at their new purchase, Full Tilt, is going to be offering to players. Full Tilt Poker had an update happen to its software this Tuesday, and this brought in three new features in total actually. One of the largest additions to the site now has to be their take on player segregation now, but they have done this in a different way than most of the other online poker sites had done it leading up to this point.

The idea behind this is that the sites are trying to separate the two different types of players, which are the “fish” and the “sharks”, and this basically just means the newer players who are playing for recreational purposes, from the big gamblers who possibly even play the game of poker for a living. You’ll find that other sites have done multiple things to try to make this happen, including Lock Poker making No Limit Hold’em tables for the $1/$2 stakes and higher only allowed on it’s own site instead of the other sites that fall under the new Revolution Gaming Network. PartyPoker also did something in which they hid certain tables from the skilled players, and you will see that these tables are only available to newer players to the site or losing players, and the site only stated that they did this when it was figured out by the players.

The idea for Full Tilt Poker was different than the others though, and it is called the “New to the Game” tables. These tables are going to be focused on players who are new to the game of poker and are just looking to learn it. It is also available to any new players on the site as well, and even the top players on the site are allowed to play at these tables for starters, but after a player plays 2,000 rang game hands or 75 tournaments that fall under this new format, then they will not be able to come back to the tables, and will have to head to the regular tables.

The ring game hand and tournament counters do run separately though, which means that after playing 2,000 hands at the cash game tables, you are still able to play in the tournaments until you reach that 75 mark. There are different ring game counters available for the different types of games also, so if you want to start out at the Hold’em tables and you play through those limits, then you can head over and play Omaha from there. The biggest difference that you’ll find at these tables is that the gameplay is slower than a standard table, and players have more time to act. The hand strength is displayed above the betting area to players throughout the hand, and there will also be tooltips shown on the table. Last but not least, players are only allowed to multi-table two of the New to the Game tables at a time.

You’ll find that you can play for up to $10 buy-in’s for No Limit and Pot Limit cash games, $0.10/$0.10 for the Fixed Limit games, and a max of $2.25 buy-ins for the single table Sit and Go games. The two new other changes that were made to Full Tilt Poker include the cards used to show the winning hand are highlighted, and during Multi-table tournaments players are going to have random seat re-draws.